From revival to renaissance

Celebrating dance

You can see them around the tree filled campus at Kalakshetra or in the neighbourhood of Besant Nagar, a suburb of Chennai. They represent the next generation of dancers from the most famous institution of dance in the country that celebrated its 75th anniversary on January 6, 2011.

Walking with the particular springing gait of flat footed moorhens that pick their way through the nearby Adyar estuary, or attired in the bright handloom cotton narrow width sarees wound around contrasting churidar-style pyjamas and long-sleeved blouses, with their hair plaited in one neat line down their backs they flutter like the girls out of a poem by A K Ramanujam. Some of them are blonde-haired dancers from Europe, some of them from the breakaway Russian states; others come from Japan and China, still others from both the Americas and Australia. No matter how different they look, they are aware of being part of a tradition that was initiated when Rukmini Devi started her pathbreaking journey into the world of dance, as the saying went at that time, ‘one tree, one pupil, one teacher’. It gives them a style and a reputation that they learn early on to uphold, individuals drawn together in a collective endeavour called Bharatha Natyam. For, in a sense, the Kalakshetra girls and some young men know that once they have entered the sacred portals, more precisely an ancient grove of trees and buildings of their institution, they are part of an aristocracy of dance, music and the arts.

The tree has grown into the great banyan at Kalakshetra. It still defines the space around the 100-acre campus of the institution that has grown to include many different facets of learning and living together as a community, not to mention a still unspoilt environment that nurtures flowering trees and birds, shrubs, small ponds filled with amphibian life after the monsoon, and a myriad small creatures that scuttle through the undergrowth.

As Leela Samson, the current director at the Kalakshetra Foundation recalls of her own student days, “It was much more wild when we were studying here. We would have snakes and other small creatures crawling at our feet when we walked back from dinner at night, but we were so used to them that we never gave them a second thought.” It’s this sense of the inter-connectedness of life that makes a performance of the great dance-dramas set in the forest grove where a Shakuntala meets her prince, or the cycle of the Ramayana and Mahabharatha epics, so vivid. As the dancers enact their elaborate stories and the musicians weave their songs, just outside the magnificent theatre, built in the round kootambalam style of Kerala, but grander in size, the owls, the night jars and crickets appear to be listening. In the pauses, they add a little light music too.

Or as members of a group of magnificent white turbaned drummers from Manipur in swirling red, white and gold costumes performed for one night under the stars at Kalakshetra said, “This is sacred space for us. We feel like we have been transformed into Gods!” And certainly, for some moments, they seemed to have come down like the cloud messengers of Kalidasa, drumming with voices of thunder and swirling their heads like dervishes caught up in a storm. They were part of an initiative started by Leela Samson to bring the craft heritage of the country with the Dastakari Haat mela organised by Jaya Jaitley and combine them with folk and classical dance and music performances during the ten days of the craft festival.

Obviously, the story of Rukmini Devi and her evolution as a dancer is one that has been told often. It bears repetition however. In today’s context, there have been repeated criticisms that the Kalakshetra style of Bharatha Natyam, which evolved from an earlier form known as sadhir, that was performed by temple dancers, also known as Devadasis, did away with the earthy eroticism of that style and became a pale imitation, which has been called brahminised. Many of these critics lay the blame for this on Rukmini Devi herself.

As Leela Samson has recounted in her recently published biography, Rukmini Devi: A life, her journey was one filled with the tumult of divergent forces that were shaping the course of Indian independence. And yet, there seems, as we look back, a pattern that we can now trace as effortlessly as the dancers who learn their steps in their airy classrooms around the Kalakshetra campus. Rukmini Devi belonged to a traditional brahmin family from Madurai, her father was with the Public Works Department and her mother was keenly interested in music. It was because of her father’s initiation into the fledgling Theosophical Society that the family moved to Madras and became absorbed in the new ideas that science and the European Renaissance brought in the early years of the 20th century. One might even trace a similarity to the development of a Europeanised sensibility with an Indian one, as seen with the influence of Tagore in Bengal and the Brahmo movement. It was a refined aesthetic, somewhat removed perhaps from the grosser vernacular one, which only now is seen as overly elitist and effete.

Rukmini Devi’s marriage at the age of 16 to the 41-year-old Dr George Arundale created an uproar in its time. It was however due to this marriage that she was not only able to work with Dr Annie Besant, and travel all over the world, but also come under the influence that was to make the most significant impact on her life. She was already in the late 30s when she watched Anna Pavlova dance at Bombay. As she was to say, “I can never forget her, for she showed me the great possibilities in dance as an art form.” Later on, travelling on a ship to Australia, Rukmini Devi learnt dance from one of Pavlova’s gifted students.

Rukmini Devi had already taken part in various theatrical performances at the Theosophical Society. At the same time, she confesses, “I felt dissatisfied and wanted to learn Bharatha Natyam based on the classical music which I love, and to do something more serious.” She has watched the Pandanallur Sisters perform and felt that she could learn the dance from a good teacher. However, it was only Mylapore Gowri Amma, who would agree to teach her at that time. Not only was it unheard of for a young woman from a background such as hers to want to learn sadhir, there would be no performance space for her to actually dance in front of an audience. However, Rukmini Devi had her supporters. She danced at the Diamond Jubilee Celebrations of the Theosophical Society in 1935.

As she writes, “It was later, seeing its impact on the public that I felt it could be my vocation. Dr Besant and Dr Arundale were working for the freedom of India. I thought that a cultural renaissance would be equally meaningful, that a country which was losing its identity would be best served by a revival of its traditional arts.” As she never failed to remind her audiences later on, “Many people have said many things about my being a pioneer. I can only say that I did not consciously go after dance. It was dance that found me.”
Once the first step was taken, her first pupil was Radha Burnier, who continues today as the gracious president of the Theosophical Society. Everything else seemed to follow. When she needed to create the costumes initially for herself and then for the dance dramas, there was a revival of the handloom weaving traditions and the making of what came to be known as the broad bordered cotton sarees, that are known as the Kalakshetra style. Even the draping of the saree follows a unique Kalakshetra method.

Motifs from temple jewellery were re-produced; artists from Shanthiniketan came forward to help in designing the stage accessories. Persons such as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, who were part of the early days, helped in the craft revival, Madame Maria Montessori set up her educational models and, as everyone remembers, the whole of Kalakshetra hummed with the sound of the great musicians of that era.

As Leela Samson has explained elsewhere, her mission has been to bring a sense of beauty back into the campus where both the buildings and the trees have grown old and in some cases gone wild. There is already a museum that showcases the many gifts and mementoes which Rukmini Devi received during her travels, but there will be a new museum, where both Rukmini Devi’s tryst with dance and the destiny of the country will be showcased.